Wednesday Night's Play Group

Our first gaming session was held last night, and it was a lot of fun. Betty, Dan, and I played a few games on Dan's XBox360: Burnout, Crash Bandicoot, and Table Tennis. I think that we all enjoyed playing Burnout. I love racing games in general, your attention is always fixed on the game. In RPGs there is a tendency for gamers to walk away from the game for a while to get a clearer perspective on their tricky situation, but with racing it isn't possible to distance yourself from the events taking place on screen. In fact, the gamer is drawn into a racing game more so than if it were an RPG, or even a dreaded MMO (and we all know how fixated MMOers can get).
The gamer is sucked into the hand-eye coordinated action of playing a racing game, it envelopes them. They don't notice that their tongues are sticking out of their mouths and slightly to the right, and they aren't aware of their commentary as they narrowly miss a head-on collision. Have you ever been in a situation where you're in a friend's car and while the two of you are having a conversation the driver suddenly says something crude and out of context? Well, I know that when I'm racing I make noises, grunts, and I suck air in through clenched teeth for long intervals of time.
A racing game is really the only kind of game that absorbs my attention completely. I get excited when I race because there isn't just a goal, there is a time constraint and other rivals that I have to beat. It isn't good enough that I made it to the end, it has to be before everyone else does. Some friends of mine back in high school would get together for gaming parties, but it wasn't the friendly atmosphere you would imagine. They each brought a TV and a gaming console to one guy's house and set up FF7. Then they would all load the game at the same time, and race to see who was the one that finished first. FF7 is a game that could last for well over 50 hours if you wanted to unlock everything, but my friends had done all that, they knew all of the game's little secrets. The real challenge lay in who knew it the best, and therefore, who finished first. The same thing goes for racing games. If you know every inch of the track, then you are the one who will finish first.
But besides the social context of gaming, I truly enjoyed Burnout. It handled well, the tracks were interesting but not too distracting. The more you play the more cars you can unlock, and the details on these cars are amazing. The crash scenes look real, and in this game you're actually encouraged to crash because it increases your level of boost power. Also, if you get into a big crash, the restart time isn't as delayed as it is in other racing games; you're back on the track within five seconds.
We also played Crash Bandicoot racing and that was definitely harder. You were racing toward a goal but you could also use boxes that unlocked helpful tools for either offensive or defensive use. Now the point isn't that you need to know the track well in order to gain an advantage, rather you need to know how to distract your rivals by throwing bombs and banana peels.
The last game we played was purely for fun: Table Tennis. It brought me back to my Mortal Kombat days of button mashing madness. I had no idea how to hit the ping pong ball, but I somehow succeeded in beating both Betty and Dan. I rule.